Advocacy: three approaches
The attorney general, Lady Scotland, favours the bulldozer style of “on message” presentation. Its limitations were, however, somewhat exposed at her speech at the annual ILEX presidential lunch earlier this month.
Lady Scotland opened with the news that the description of the Crown Prosecution Service's unqualified advocates, many of whom are ILEX members, would be upgraded. Out goes “designated case worker” and in comes “associate prosecutor”. This went down well. She then delivered the core of her speech: the UK has done much, and will do more, to make itself a world-leader in its toughness against fraud and the causes of fraud. All sorts of resources were be reorganised and re-marshalled in the assault. The relevance of this topic to ILEX was unclear: the attorney's sheer chutzpah, however, in making her pitch without a single reference to the contentious case of BAE Systems plc was evident.
Lady Scotland's silence was the more surprising since it later emerged that BAE's chief executive and a senior director had been arrested several days earlier by US officials seeking to establish breach of the Foreign
